Our new home

My roommate Diamante (another Servant Partners intern) and I just moved into our apartment in Northwest Pasadena this last week, and we've been busy settling in. We are located right at the corner of two fairly main streets, so the traffic is a continual low hum outside--except for when people drive by blasting their radios, and then we have free music! We also hear sirens quite a bit because the fire station is located near by. Yet somehow, I don't think of my apartment as noisy. A bizarre tidbit--the apartment on one side of us, the house on the other side, and the complex across the street are all full of students at Fuller Theological Seminary. Not quite our expected neighbors! We were initially supposed to be living in an area a few blocks south, where Northwest Neighbors is located, as we will be working with that organization, but they couldn't find housing for us, so we are up here instead. It's still a low-income area, but with slightly different demographics. I'll hopefully be able to post more details after I've lived here a little longer.

At any rate, it's lovely to be settled in a place, and with all of our pictures and things unpacked, it's starting to feel homey. God is so good and provided abundantly for us: Dia had a little furniture but another person moved into a furnished apartment and so is lending us all of their furniture, and someone else lent us a bunk bed and mattress, and our apartment came with a fridge and stove. So now the only thing we still need is one more mattress! But it's ok, I'm using my sleeping bag for now. It's still strange to think about where I was three weeks ago and where I am now--my host Kulot's house in Manila is the size of the bathroom in my apartment. The disconnect in realities is so huge. Diamante and I are trying to figure out how to live more simply, for multiple reasons--as an act of solidarity with the poor, as a reminder to ourselves of the disparities in the world, and as a way of freeing more resources to put to better use--but they seem like such small actions. sigh.

Other than unpacking, we've been busy job-searching. Thankfully we finally got a phone line and internet today, which should help the job search. I used a laundromat for the first time the other day, and we've been running various random errands. It's also been fun to try our hands at cooking. Dia is from Texas, and her mom is white while her dad is culturally Cuban, so she's been making chalupas and southern sweet tea for me, and I'm cooking stir-fry and Thai curry for her. :) Yum!